Maybe because the irrational fear that surrounds something with a transmission rate of 1 out of millions can affect the market far more so than actual health of the population at large. If this tells us anything at all (which I doubt) it would be something about the emotional factor in futures trading.

You twits who keep sneering at people with "irrational fear" seem to think nothing should be done about an incident that could be the start of an epidemic if not dealt with promptly, or a massive disaster that could poison an enormous amount of populated land for generations.

Whether it's nuclear power in the hands of amoral incompetent business types or deadly diseases, you idiots believe you're experts and know better than the actual experts. Well, you don't, so why don't you just shut up and appreciate t

Indeed. Four cases of a disease in cows (in the US), with three humans infected is indeed extremely threatening. Never mind the UK had an actual epidemic, with over 180,000 cases in cows, and still only had 176 people infected (from Wikipedia). In my mind, that makes BSE less dangerous than... well, just about everything. Hell, there have only been 280 reported cases of infected humans from BSE, ever. Tell me again why people should be scared? Yes, health officials should be careful: damned careful. The average person? Don't worry about it.

No one said nothing should be done. They did what needed to be done: euthanized the cow and dispose of the corpse properly.

Of course, the USDA has required insanely higher levels of testing for cows/beef from Canada.

Of coruse! - It's Canada! - We all know they're planning to invade the US and it would make their invasion much easier if everybody had CJD (the human variant of BSE, possibly caused by eating BSE-infected meat), right? - So remain vigilant when it comes to those pesky Canadians!:)

The problem is:
1) Cows SHOULD NOT even get infected. That means that cows are fed lightly processed cow meat.
2) BSE is a disease with very long incubation period. If BSE infected food supply then we can start getting many new infections.
3) BSE is incurable and always leads to death.

It doesn't mean that the cow are fed cow meat at all. The prion [wikipedia.org] that cause BSE [wikipedia.org] can be created naturally through mutation, and then reproduce. This kind of mutation happens very occasionally, but it does happen often enough that we have seen it happen several times. This is believed to be such a case; to quote the Associated Press coverage [ap.org]:

Clifford said the California cow is what scientists call an atypical case of BSE, meaning that it didn't get the disease from eating infected cattle feed, which is important.

That means it's "just a random mutation that can happen every once in a great while in an animal," said Bruce Akey, director of the New York State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Cornell University.

BSE is poorly tested for in the USA (regulations not adhered to or relaxed) , this is why many US beef products are/were unwelcome in Japan.Human infection is understated, symptoms and diagnosis can take 10 years to manifest. There are postmortem studies performed in the 90's that indicate over 25% of diagnosed dementia and Alzheimer's victims were actually BSE infected individuals.

These studies were not widely distributed and testing has been allowed to become relaxed for purely economic reasons.... See the UK incidence.

BSE is poorly tested for in the USA (regulations not adhered to or relaxed) , this is why many US beef products are/were unwelcome in Japan.Human infection is understated, symptoms and diagnosis can take 10 years to manifest. There are postmortem studies performed in the 90's that indicate over 25% of diagnosed dementia and Alzheimer's victims were actually BSE infected individuals.

These studies were not widely distributed and testing has been allowed to become relaxed for purely economic reasons.... See the UK incidence.

Humans don't get BSE (Hint: The 'B' stands for 'Bovine') - they get Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD). They're both prion diseases but the actual prion involved differs. It is believed that BSE prions from food can trigger invalid folding of the CJD prion in humans and thus CJD but the details are not completely understood. Both BSE and CJD can also be triggered through genetic defects, either hereditary or through mutations.

By American beef. If you actually read the report from the CDC the 3 people diagnosed in the US all are believed to have been infected when they were living outside of the US. (If I remember correctly 2 were British and it's expected they were infected when they lived in the UK and the 3rd was a Saudi that got infected in Saudia Arabia.) IE worry more about dying from bad spinach or contaminated tap water.

In my mind, that makes BSE less dangerous than... well, just about everything.

Yes, but what you are failing to understand is that whilst there may have been 180,000 cows who caught the disease, that is a small drop in the ocean compared to the number of animals who were put down to prevent any possibility of transmission. After the disease devastated the export market for British beef, it devastated the beef industry as a whole, and put countless farmers out of business (with numerous reports of farmers taking their own lives). It took decades for the industry to recover. It's a hideous disease.

it still hasn't recovered. Have you seen the price of prime cut lately? I have, but that's only because I went shopping yesterday. For comparison, a kilo of smoked wild atlantic salmon fillet is £23. A kilo of prime cut beef is £24. That's ASDA price. I shit ye not, a knot of beef the size of your fist will lighten your wallet by at least £10.

Way back when a beef dinner was an almost daily occurrence for me (1992), a kilo of prime cut could be had for change out of a fiver. On the bone was

ndeed. Four cases of a disease in cows (in the US), with three humans infected is indeed extremely threatening. Never mind the UK had an actual epidemic, with over 180,000 cases in cows, and still only had 176 people infected (from Wikipedia). In my mind, that makes BSE less dangerous than... well, just about everything

It's not just the infection rate that scares people, but the lethality. CJD is probably[*] 100% fatal within 6-18 months, with no known cure.But so are a whole lot of other things, which we do not obsess about - we take reasonable precautions and go on living.I will still enjoy eating marrow bones, just like I enjoy driving on the road. Without any risk, life would not be precious, and not worth living.

[*] IIRC, we can't say for sure because a couple of the reported cases died from other causes.

People should be scared because if they catch it their brains will decompose. Noone wants that. The risks of BSE are higher than the risks of passive smoking, and look how many laws we need to manage that huge threat.

The apparent infectiousness of current Mad Cow prion strains is negligible. But, I'd be more concerned knowing of the existence of Chronic Wasting Disease [wikipedia.org] of Deer and Elk, which apparently has significant animal-to-animal transmission rates. Species-jumping ability of CWD still seems poor, but it's ability to maintain endemic passage in a natural setting (without cannibalistic feeding practices) is worrying.

Can Prions mutate to give the same transmissibility in cattle? Right now, nobody knows.

Actually the odds are better that you kid will be killed by a car (77 to 1), drowning in a bathtub ( 685,000 to 1 ) slipping and killing himself/herself in the shower (2,232 to 1) even being struck by lightning (576,000 to 1 ) hell they even have better odds of dating a supermodel (88,000 to 1) or striking it rich on antiques roadshow ( 60,000 to 1). Here is the source [funny2.com] so I'd say out of ALL the things we parents ACTUALLY have to worry about BSE is pretty damned low on the list. Not saying that can't change, not saying we shouldn't do our best to protect the food supply, just saying panicking is probably pretty unwarranted ATM.

Actually the odds of being killed by flu was enormously lower in 1917 than in 1918: "The unusually severe disease killed up to 20% of those infected, as opposed to the usual flu epidemic mortality rate of 0.1%" [Wikipedia]. If you were in the 20-40 age range the spike was even larger.

That's why brain-fitted humans are slightly more nervous about infectious diseases than shower slipping: unless the "One Lamborghini Per Child" program is implemented, illnesses have a far greater potential of quickly changing their odds of terminating your life than the other causes of death you cited.

Your referenced source says "Odds of being killed sometime in the next year in any sort of transportation accident: 77 to 1," which you paraphrased as "you kid will be killed by a car (77 to 1)."

And there is obviously something wrong with this one, since your chances of dying next year aren't even 77 to 1. Perhaps they meant the chance that, if you die next year, you will die in any sort of transportation accident is 77 to 1.

Or maybe they just made it up, since your referenced source has no referenced sources.

But the article I found on Google News' health section explained there was no effectiveness in using a ridiculous form of treatment, so reading that article would not actually be useful to people suffering from migraines.

The same protein is present in human brains, and it is absolutely transmissible to and between any mammal (or at least any mammal that uses that protein, or one similar enough to be similarly affected). My great aunt died from it decades ago. She contracted it in England as a child, apparently.

So we only have an estimated population of around 7 billion people, yet as of November 2006 there were 200 individuals worldwide diagnosed with mad cow disease, including 164 people in the United Kingdom, 21 in France, 4 in the Republic of Ireland, the 3 in the US, 2 in the Netherlands, and 1 each in Canada, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, and Spain, according to the CDC. Of these individuals, most (170) had lived in the UK for over 6 months during the years 1980-1996; 20 others had lived in France during that time. [taken from: http://rarediseases.about.com/od/rarediseases1/a/vcjd.htm [about.com] ]

With a name like yours you'd think you would have figured out such an obvious answer. The CDCs number was one in ten billion per consumption of contaminated meat. Of course, the number is still horseshit, but your analysis is obviously wrong Mr. Obvious.

Now consider that the CDC statistic likely refers to the per-exposure chance. 200 people worldwide with the disease, a one in 10 billion is about 2 trillion exposures, which works out to about only needing 285 exposures per person since 1980. I've personally been exposed to risky meat more than that.

I am not an epidemiologist, though, and I'd wager that your and GP aren't, either.

I am not an epidemiologist, though, and I'd wager that your and GP aren't, either.

You've been exposed to meat that is dramatically riskier for reasons other than BSE far more often, though. You're far more likely to die from biologically contaminated meat than prion contaminated meat. Enormously higher. I don't know about you, but I still order my burgers medium rare. Life is a terminal disease, and you only get to do it once. Personally, I'd rather worry about what I want to do with that time, and the risks from things that might actually impact that time. BSE is not one of them.

I don't know about BSE-contamininated, but I chose my words carefully... I just said "risky". Between volunteering in Africa and traveling around Europe, I've had my share of meat that I knew had unclean sources. I've had the intestinal worms to prove it.

Yeah, perhaps the American Red Cross will now allow people from Europe or who have lived in Europe to donate blood.

As of now, people who have "spent (visited or lived) a cumulative time of 5 years or more from January 1, 1980, to present, in any combination of country(ies) in Europe" are ineligible to donate; the time is even shorter (3 months) for the UK, all because of mad cow paranoia.

You can bet demand will go down in the short term as Americans get into paranoia mode about beef, and supply isn't going to go anywhere (in fact they may go up as exports decline due to international fear of US beef) Yummy steaks here we come!

Nice graphic. One note however: The "National Tracking System" (at least as currently envisioned -- comprehensive and applying to all livestock) is going to be yet a further burden harming small family farms. The last version of the system I looked at would require updating a database every time livestock moved onto a non-contiguous property. While this isn't an issue for large feedlot operations, many small farms lease pasture from neighbors and transport the animals a mile or two on a regular basis.

As a Wisconsinite who always snickers a little when I see one of those moronic "Happy Cows come from California" commercials on TV, I'll probably tear something from laughter the next time I see one. Cheese is part of our holy trinity: Beer, the Packers, and Cheese. Californian dairies probably aren't aware of the fact that a cow udder with one teat ain't an udder.

Prions are primarily present in nerve tissue. The major concentration of nerve tissue is in cuts of meat like the T-Bone, which by their nature may still have traces of the spinal cord. Stick with cheaper, lesser cuts of meat (that aren't pink slime...) such as chuck, shank, and brisket, and you'll be fine.

Prions are primarily present in nerve tissue. The major concentration of nerve tissue is in cuts of meat like the T-Bone, which by their nature may still have traces of the spinal cord. Stick with cheaper, lesser cuts of meat (that aren't pink slime...) such as chuck, shank, and brisket, and you'll be fine.

The problem is how beef is processed. The very first cut is right down the middle of the spine spraying bits of spinal cord all over the meat. A tiny amount of prions can cause infection so avoiding certain cuts will have no affect. Avoiding organ meats that involve brain and nerve tissue isn't a bad idea but the only sure way to avoid exposure other than avoiding beef is to thoroughly cook the meat. Eating rare meat is risky. The fact that they only test downer cattle means that there is contaminated meat

This is the tip of the iceberg - consider how cattle are primarily killed: the captive-bolt gun. It propels a chunk of steel into the animal's brain, which is pulverized, and bits of brain are then carried through the body of the animal via the circulatory system.

And as the OP mentions, nerve tissue is where prions are found, and TSE's are found primarily in the brain. It turns the brain to 'sponge', thus the S in Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE (Mad Cow) which is Bovine Spongiform Enceph

Absolutely. A random test of a cow supposedly not destined for the food supply gets tested positive. And we are to believe everything else is OK? I think a new guy on the job didn't get the memo and tested the wrong cow. Lets see how quickly they expand the testing. All QC policies I've worked under, allowed for decreased sampling until a defect was found, then a full statistically sample had to be pulled and tested.

There was a suggestion to do private testing for BSE by individual ranchers the last time there was an 'outbreak'. The idea was to market their product as having been tested. But that was banned by the USDA [life-enhancement.com].

[The "rapid" BSE test in question] can detect abnormal prions only if they exist in a relatively high concentration, and abnormal prions typically reach detectable concentrations only two to three months before an animal exhibits observable symptoms. The incubation period for BSE (i.e., from infection to observable symptoms) is two to eight yearsâ"the average being five yearsâ"and cattle younger than thirty months are rarely symptomat

can exist in a cow for years before symptoms manifest clearly for visual detection, its possible the steak at the supermarket is infected regardless. early symptoms include the inability of cattle to stand properly, so instead of testing the USDA simply mandated that downed cattle cannot be used for slaughter. this of course has been sidestepped as a regulation in the past.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy#Regulatory_failures [wikipedia.org]
in some cases, we cant even get it together to reg

>we're talking about an industry thats basically run its own government sanctioned regulatory board. this board is a shining example of why an agency charged with regulating as well as promoting is flawed on a fundamental level.

Same thing with nuclear power, the board are also the promoters. The farm lobby is also similar in many of its government connections.

This was a single point case of BSE; it wasn't the result of a transmission vector like contaminated feed, it just arose naturally (like prion diseases do in most mammals on rare occasions)

Ever since we stopped feeding ground up cow parts to other cows, the rate of BSE has dropped to near zero; it's only when cow engage in cannibalism that the disease spreads to enough cattle to produce a measurable risk to any human.

In response, the California state government passed an emergency bill that doubled public employee pensions, authorized another "fifty blagillion miles" of track to the high speed rail they think is going to be built, and outlawed all businesses with more than zero employees. Governor Brown signed the bill and said to the press, "A vision stands on someone else's feet. The light at the end of the tunnel has its world revealed by trees." before passing out and being wheeled away.

Only buy beef from ranches with 100% grass fed cows. Anyone who has been lucky enough to eat steak in Argentina or Uruguay knows that US beef is tasteless junk anyway. Argentine cows graze naturally on grass and they are the best tasting cows in the world.

Of course not eating animals in the first place isn't a bad idea. It's a filthy habit which unfortunately many of us learn in childhood and find it difficult to break even when, as adults, we are aware of how barbaric it is. I think Mark Zuckerberg has the

Your numbers on Argentina beef are really old, based on last years numbers only around 20% of Argentina beef was 100% grass fed and alot of that was not exported.
Most of the Argentina beef is grass feed and grain finished, like you get the USA, or they are doing more is just locking the calfs into large pens using steroids, antibiotics, cheap high calorie food and almost no physical movement to produce a tendor steer, quick to market.

I've given up on commercial beef. I will by free range from someone I know but rarely get the chance these days. How long before I go completely vegetarian?

There's plenty of good reasons to go vegetarian (and plenty of good counterarguments), but fear of BSE-contaminated beef isn't one of them. You're significantly more likely to find contaminated alfalfa than you are beef. We're talking about extremely low chances on either side of the equation, but still...

If you're really looking for an excuse to eat less meat, start with human evolution and its impact on digestion... 20,000 years ago we didn't eat meat every day... many of us didn't eat meat every week. An

As a Canadian, I've had moose before and it's actually quite good, along the same lines as venison. Moose sausage is absolutely to die for! Personally, I prefer bison to beef anyway, it's much leaner and quite tasty. I tend to stay away from beef as much as possible in favor of fish or poultry.

Since a cow cannot vocalise in a way that we humans can understand, we cannot tell if said cow is a: self aware or b: questioning the conditions of its own existence or simply c: it is calling to a potential mate or a calf; therefore we have to conclude that it is indeed, mad (by our standards).

If that were actually the real policy, then there would never be any outbreaks. The disease only transfers by eating brains and nerves. The cows can only catch it if the farmers are feeding their cows brains and nerves. From sick cows. Which is pretty disgusting considering they are herbivores.

If that were actually the real policy, then there would never be any outbreaks. The disease only transfers by eating brains and nerves. The cows can only catch it if the farmers are feeding their cows brains and nerves. From sick cows. Which is pretty disgusting considering they are herbivores.

Um, you do realize that this is exactly what they do, right? The remains from slaughtered animals are processed and put back into animal feed.